Upon finishing reading it, it seems natural and inevitable that the title of Manuel Calderón’s latest book – for which he has won the 2024 Comillas Prize for History, Biography and Memoirs – coincides with that of a film by Jean Pierre Melville (Le deuxième souffle, 1966), a magnificent black and ascetic thriller starring beings condemned to failure.

As in her, Calderón (Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo, 1957) narrates in Hasta el ultimo breath the story of a man embarked on a flight to nowhere in which hope has no place, a loser surrounded by losers stripped of any mythological aura that He moves frantically, with a gun in his hand, in Barcelona in the first half of the seventies, in the throes of a Franco regime that, still decrepit, was willing to show its most ferocious face.

There is no doubt that the book is destined to generate a heated controversy, because the man in question is one of the undisputed secular saints of the anti-Franco pantheon, Salvador Puig Antich. And those around him, like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, the members of an absurd anarchoid guerrilla group ignored, if not despised, by the entire political opposition to the dictatorship and dedicated to robbing bank offices in order to “expropriate” some funds of which not even a penny reached the working class in whose name he claimed to act: the MIL (Iberian Liberation Movement).

Few people remember the MIL, but not long ago Mayor Colau inaugurated a viewpoint in Barcelona dedicated to Puig Antich in Nou Barris, very close to a branch of Hispano Americano on Paseo de Fabra i Puig where, during one of her “actions”, a forgotten worker, the accountant Melquíades Flores, was shot by his alleged liberators that left him blind for life.

It was a small group of barely a dozen members that operated with criminal success and zero political relevance in that tense and strange Barcelona, ??when hippies, hashish and King Crimson concerts coexisted with an archaic regime; when the intellectuals of the gauche divine pontificated at Boccaccio’s bar with a whiskey in their hands about the future of the revolution and Zeleste was inaugurated on Argenteria Street.

They were very young, came from good families, had only left home in their early twenties and lived in shared apartments, among Janis Joplin records and Easy Ryder posters, as those left-wing middle-class students who acted under false consciousness used to do. that his inexhaustible conversations and his childish exaltation of gunmanism had something to do with the revolution.

Calderón gives an account of the spirit of that time with the melancholy of those who lived it. It analyzes the military process that ended with the execution of Puig Antich with rigor, highlighting the inconsistencies of the summary and the infamy of the garrote, but without considering as revealed dogma the new interpretations of a trial in which at no time did the defense argue that It was not proven that the shots that killed the police officer who participated in his arrest did not come from Puig Antich’s pistol.

Calderón does not discuss the injustice of the death penalty, he is only part of that handful of authors who do not intend to make Historical Memory from fiction, no matter how full of good intentions it may be. As one of the MIL survivors says, Puig Antich himself would abhor this sweetened vision of the facts: he always said that they would not take him alive, that he would shoot his way until his last breath.

The counterpoint to Puig Antich is provided by another tragic character, the police officer who died in the shootout on the day of the arrest. His name was Francisco Anguas, he was twenty-four years old and he was an enthusiastic film buff whose absence left a void that his family did not know how to fill. His mother declared herself against the execution of Puig Antich, but she regretted that he did not utter a single word lamenting the death of his son. Years later, her pain consumed her and she ended her life by throwing herself into the void from her modest apartment in a neighborhood of Seville. Nobody remembered Francisco Anguas or his mother. Manuel Calderón does it in this brilliant and moving essay.

Manuel Calderón Until the last breath. Puig Antich, a forgotten policeman and a countercultural guerrilla in Barcelona Tusquets 401 pages 21.90 euros